Diary of a Death March: Steve's Story

Has it been days? Weeks, even? I can't remember the last time I saw anything other than the slate gray cubicle walls surrounding my "office." Is "outside" even a thing anymore? What is "sunlight"? What day is it? Does it even matter what day it is?

Course it doesn't. I'd still be here regardless. They didn't care about Christmas. Oh, they told us we could go home, "spend time with your loved ones," but that promise was wrapped in veiled threats about not keeping people who "decided that their needs were more important than the team's."

All that matters to them is that we meet some immovable deadline that marketing sold to the customer. Nobody's going home until the work is done. So sayeth the management. Ugh. Let's see one of them do this for weeks on end, see how well they fare. They wouldn't make a week before begging to be let out of their offices.

Considering what they've told us to do, I might just leave them in there if I had that opportunity.

January 28th

My eyes won't focus anymore. Sleeping on the floor of my cube the last three nights has really taken a toll on me. But the sooner I get this done, the sooner I can go home. I gotta keep marching.

Jim snapped last night. Just friggin lost it. He tore his phone out of the wall and threw it as hard as he could. He's lucky it didn't hit anybody, but he was fired anyway. I feel ya, bro. Just gotta keep my head down. Maybe I'll actually get to see my girlfriend this weekend if I can avoid getting attention drawn to me. Maybe if I do a good job they'll cut us some slack on the next project.

I can only hope.

February 6th

Well, there went the deadline. Whoosh. Right past us. Management doubled down, telling the customer that we'd have the system done by April. Never mind that 80% of the tests are currently failing, never mind that there's no documentation, never mind that the code itself looks like a drunk monkey wrote it and had his friend the high-as-a-kite rhino review it. It would take a year to get it all in working order. We've got two months. FML.

February 15th

Vanessa gave me an earful last night. I totally forgot about Valentine's Day. Unit tests and interaction design and business rules have conquered my mind, shoving out everything else. God let this nightmare end.

February 19th

Why I am I doing this? I have to ask myself. This company was my life for the past five years. It was an amazing place to work, and we made good, quality apps. I was proud of what we were doing here. Then the owners sold the company and the new owners came in, and everything went to hell.

But I don't think I can get a job anywhere else. I've only ever worked here. What if I'm just not good enough? That's what they keep telling me. If I leave, what if I don't find another job? I could be risking my career over one bad project. Surely every other developer goes through this, right?

I just gotta make it to April.

March 10th

I moved my twin-size mattress into my cube. Little point sleeping at home anymore. Besides, if anything goes down on the server, I'm the one that has to fix it. I'm the only one that can; Kelly quit yesterday. And for some goddamn reason the suits won't let us VPN into the network. "Security issue" they said, which is the same as saying "reasons." It's BS, all of it, they just don't wanna hire the person with the skills necessary to set that up. Cheap bastards.

So now I'm working 20-hour shifts, 7 days a week, regularly getting woken up in the middle of the night, just generally hating my life. At least I'm getting better sleep, a whole four hours of it now. Progress!

Just three more weeks. Just three more weeks. Just three more weeks.

March 31

Delivery day is tomorrow. We've got the app in fairly good working order (relatively speaking) but if anything breaks, hoo boy it's gonna be a pain to track down. I can barely read my own code, much less anybody else's. We're all rushing to get done, nobody has time to care about quality.

But we're almost done. Tomorrow, the nightmare ends. Finally!

April 1st (First Entry)

HHENYFU4891JCKDAGFSJXYVDJEBTKGBOPDQPPQQPQPDOYVYCSNRGIFJCNDRI5!!!!!!'n

April 1st (Second Entry)

Screw this. The customer didn't like one part of the app. They wanted "just a little tweak to this process." Sales promised that we'd have it ready to go in two weeks.

IT'S A TWO MONTH PROJECT AT LEAST TO IMPLEMENT WHAT THE CUSTOMER WANTS, YOU DIPSHITS!

I've had it. I'm out. These asshole managers can find some other developer's life to ruin. I can't take anymore of this. Six months of this hell is more than enough. I'll take my chances somewhere else, somewhere I might actually be appreciated.